Early designs of ignition systems including jet ignition sources for motor vehicles having internal combustion engines are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,092,088; 3,230,939; and 4,250,852, for example. Refinements of such an ignition system having a precombustion chamber and often two or more jet ignition sources are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,361,122; 4,416,228; 4,924,828, and 5,522,357, for example.
The feature common to all these ignition systems having what is referred to as jet ignition (JI) is that a spark is required for initializing the combustion of fuel in a combustion chamber of the internal combustion engine; a spark plug must be provided for spark generation.
The quality of the combustion process is basically limited when a spark is used as the combustion triggering pulse since high temperatures prevail here by the nature of the system and the ignition point is difficult to influence.
The concept of what is known as compression ignition represents an alternative which is, however, usually very complex with regard to its design layout.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide an ignition system of an internal combustion engine having a device for igniting a jet of a fuel/air mixture using which improved quality of the combustion process is achievable in contrast to ignition systems having a conventional spark ignition, and which is implementable involving little technical complexity.